Introducing a Design Vision at Forecast

Defining a Design Vision at Forecast

My role

I am the sole UX Designer, with joint product ownership.

Objectives

Forecast is a PM tool that aims to smooth the disjointed experience of having to juggle multiple tools for different aspects of the project management practice. Below, I describe some of the design principles that I introduced at Forecast and the results they produced.

Language Agnostic

We decided not to anchor ourselves to any particular PM methodology, and so, keeping the language clear and PM agnostic was a priority. To this purpose, we elaborated a dictionary of our terms and tested it with PMs working for different organisations, to see if they all understood what they meant.

Progressive Disclosure

Our main principle here was to keep the app as uncluttered as possible, since we were positioning ourselves as an alternative to clunky PM tools. In order to keep the complexity needed for expert users, without compromising the uncluttered design, progressive disclosure was used in many places.

Google Material Design

Working for a startup, one has to be pragmatic. With no time to create a design stylesheet from scratch, we decided to apply the principles of Material Design: card-based reporting dashboards, clear, full-screen flows and clean, unobtrusive forms.

Custom stylesheets

Based on the Material Design principles I re-skinned some of the existing components, thus creating a style guide in my spare moments. Thus we had our own style library, whilst still making sure that we were building from fully tested patterns.

Results

After the redesign, both old customers and new acquisitions praised the intuitiveness and simplicity of the interface. This was manifested through comments in our Customer Service tool, surveys and direct messages.